Preview: Firefox 2.0b1

Earlier today Mozilla announced the next next milestone for FF 2.0, Beta 1 has been released. There a handful of new features and changes with this release, which I will touch on briefly.

Undo Close Tab. The one feature I always loved about SessionSaver was ‘snapback tab’. Accidentally closed the wrong tab, just go into the tools menu, under SessionSaver, Snapback Tab and select the tab you wanted to reopen. FF 2.0 has this feature now and is much simpler to use. Simply right-click anywhere on the tab bar and select ‘Undo Close Tab’. Firefox will automatically reopen the last tab you closed (repeat as needed for multiple tabs), putting you back right where you were. Note: Automatic restoration of browser session still only applies to a crash (or when you click the restart link in the add-ons manager) not if you close the browser.

Warn when opening a lot of tabs at once. This options is so new it is not even in the help yet. To access this option, from Tools Menu, select Options…,click on Tabs and it is the last option on the list. I have not run into (or heard from anyone who has) any troublesome sites which open tons of tabs at once. I’ve had this happen on IE a site would open windows faster than I could close them. It got to the point Windows had a heart-attack and crashed, not a pretty site! Kudos to the developers for thinking ahead on this one.

Inline Spell checking. This has been an available feature for a while, but was not working correctly on certain sites such as Blog sites, Delphi Forums, etc. Still going to take some getting use to right-clicking on the misspelled words.

Anti-Phishing. Major improvements have been made to this feature. No longer do you need to buggy Google Toolbar. Here’s the info from the FF 2.0 Beta 1 FAQs:

How does the Phishing Protection feature work in Firefox 2 Beta 1?Phishing Protection is turned on by default in Firefox 2 Beta 1, and works by checking the sites that you browse to against a list of known phishing sites. This list is automatically downloaded and regularly updated within Firefox 2 Beta 1 when the anti-phishing feature is enabled. Since phishing attacks can occur very quickly, there’s also an option check the sites you browse to against an online service such as Google for more up-to-date protection. This enhanced capability can be turned on via the Anti-Phishing preferences pane. (Note: final set of anti-phishing service providers TBD.)”